Ah thank you Monique. It was SO lovely to meet your beautiful friend Eva a few weeks ago at an event in London. You were spoken of by us both with much love and admiration xxx
My first memory of writing is aged about three, sitting at my granny’s kitchen table. I couldn’t actually write. I was doing what artists pleasingly and importantly call mark making. I knew what I was writing was serious because I was doing joined-up writing. That was how grown-ups wrote. I hid my writing in the airing cupboard, a warm, safe space for putting important things.
Later I wrote real, decipherable notes to my parents and hid them round the house in the hope that they would find them and understand me. I was often told off for talking too much as a child. I wrote down the important things in the hope that I wouldn’t be punished and that they would read what I was not allowed to say. I’m not sure they ever found them.
When that didn’t work, I went through a phase of writing my last will and testament. I wrote it over and over again. I was desperate by this time, so I gave up hiding them and would leave them out in plain view. I remember being so desperate I actually showed one to my mum. She said: ‘Why are you writing a will when you haven’t got anything to leave anyone?’ which very much missed the point. It’s not what I would have said if I had found one my kids incessantly writing their will at the age of 12.
I come from the generation of children brought up in the dying days of Victorian parenting methods. I felt like I was not seen and despite the talking, rarely heard. Writing was a different matter. Both my parents were readers, they valued the written word. I knew that if I could find the right way to make my mark, I stood a chance of being taken seriously. I had serious things to say.
What I took from my failed experience was that the way I wrote must be wrong. When my parents read what I had written, they didn’t engage with me in the way I hoped they would. I assumed that I hadn’t got the right words. It never occurred to me that they couldn’t or wouldn’t see what was in front of them, both in word and deed, and that it was not my fault.
Despite my failures I still believe that writing is my best chance of being seen and heard. The biggest challenge for me is publishing what I write. I am still fighting the desire to hide in the airing cupboard, desperate to be seen but afraid to be found out.
How do I write my truth while maintaining a relationship of trust and integrity with my family? I cannot write in isolation from my loved ones, but I cannot always find my way to writing myself without hurting them.
Thank you, Katy, for being first to brave a response to this question - which, three seasons in, felt right to offer you all: writing out of our deepest experiences being at the heart of the whole project as it is.
There is a force to your writing, a pulse, an urgency, that I've always responded to and admired - in your pieces for this project, and what I'm reading in your own Substack: which is beginning to have the feel for me of a fascinating serialised psychogeography book.
And now what you've written here gives me - and others reading it - an understanding of where that power comes from...
...I want to add 'in part' at this point: because your reading is wide and deep and hungry: that too gives authority to your prose - you are writing out of a long and yes, deep apprenticeship. An overlong apprenticeship perhaps, as mine was? You know from my book how long I held back from finding even a local outlet for my words, and why: like you, the need to be understood, to be seen and heard, was so fundamental that the risk of trying and failing - well it threatened obliteration. The loss of a held-out hope that kept me going.
Some lines from your piece that I want to pull out and focus on:
'Despite my failures I still believe that writing is my best chance of being seen and heard.'
I could have written this line myself, and everything in me says yes, yes, in response to reading it in your piece. We can be seen and valued in friendships, work roles, community groups, and in ways that nurture us. But writing - when we find a readership for it **beyond** our existing circles of belonging: this is where we can share more complicated, more nuanced, more urgent aspects of what matters to us.
How do I write my truth while maintaining a relationship of trust and integrity with my family?
I'm fairly sure you've read Melissa Febos' Body Work, where she reflects on this as someone whose first very explicit memoir came out when she was young; she has since revised how she writes the personal as it relates to others in her life.
For me personally, I found some odd and unexpected reactions to my writing based on what forum it was in: My mother was once very hurt by a single line of biography I gave in a Facebook post, back when I used it. In passing, I said to someone that I'd been raised by my farming grandmother. This was true for me emotionally and in many respects practically - all my sick days were spent with her; my weekends; my school holidays. I trusted her. Etc etc. Because my mother used Facebook this felt like a very public betrayal, even though the numbers of potential readers involved were a few hundred.
Once I no longer shared any social media forums with my family and friends, and struck out into separate territory as a writer I carried some of that learning with me. It's often very small offhand details that hurt our people when they read it rather than what we feel to be our biggest shames. This proved true with my book: Nye was very comfortable with me describing one of the greatest challenges in our marriage - actions of mine some Amazon reviewers revile me for! - but asked for single words or small details to be removed.
I also faced a larger challenge with TCFS. The book shows - at great risk to my public and private reputations - my love affair and bad behaviour as a result of that; it also shows the deep past forces that drove me to that, without excusing what I did. However, there were other difficult situations in my marriage not of my making that are NOT in the book - ones that came from my husband's side of the family, and which I was not free to write about. So. My decision was: Was there a true and useful story I could share in which some of what made me behave as I did was NOT in the story at all? I decided there was - even though I was aware that it meant me taking full narrative weight for bad behaviour that had more... what? More mitigating circumstances than I could share.
This is me trying to show some of my own decision-making process: yours will be different, but it DOES require this kind of thinking out. And then there are still the nights pre-publication when one wakes up in a cold sweat with the fear of what might happen!
I know there are other writers who take a much more straightforward approach to this issue of personal truth and the hurt it might cause. I think Annie Lamott is in this camp in Bird by Bird.
But much as I love the bracing permissions in her work and Mary Karr's, I feel the time we spend thinking about how to balance all this deepens our work.
Finally: what you say about the airing cupboard - in the past, and as an internalised space now. I too was an airing cupboard kid - literally. And publishing my memoir truly did feel like coming out. I've even come to be proud of the worst and most personally scathing reader reviews of my work online - people talk ill of us all the time: we usually don't have to hear it OR it's said as part of family/friends banter in a way that makes it hard for us to call it out. The praise of having one's work valued is truly beautiful (what you said about TCFS has carried me through many uncertain times, and always will). But the criticism and discounting and misunderstanding is also powerful: we stood up straight and showed ourselves - there's no shame in that, only courage.
Txx
NOTE: I won't curate responses to this month's invitation in full - and will only give a few lines as quotes, and only once each of you let me know by reply that you WOULD be happy for a short extract to be there. Would you prefer to have it here only? If you'd like to be quoted on the book site, perhaps you can choose a few sentences and let me know...
PS: I think you will already know the harrowing, beautiful The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, but have you watched her moving TED talk. It took her many years to move forward with that memoir, despite some very early and overwhelming interest in her as a writer...
This is such a heartfelt piece and I'm really sorry that you had such a difficult experience when you wrote as a child. I can really understand and identify with much of what you say, especially around the need to write your truth without upsetting others. I don't think there's an easy answer to this, but I hope you can find a way to keep writing how you really feel. The challenge of publishing your writing is also definitely a hard one - but I'm so glad you shared this and hope you can keep putting your writing out there.
This is powerful and written with such force of emotion. I could just feel that little girl's pain when writing her will. I hope you find a way to continue writing and sharing and that the serious little girl owns her story and has found joy, too. xx
I envy how your piece has a clear narrative arc despite it being only 500 words (I really struggled with this in writing my piece). It reads like a well-thought-out piece, and I could really feel this girl's longing to be seen, heard, appreciated and validated. And the motif of the airing cupboard is lovely -- literal and figurative, and the scene of a coming out. Thanks for this piece of really honest writing.
Such an evocative piece, I can imagine being in your shoes as a child. The frustration, the yearning to be seen and heard, the fear about what it might mean to be ignored and punished. And now I find myself in the exact same space as you, how do I write my truth which so needs to be heard, whilst maintaining a relationship with my family? Where the wounds they inflicted are the seeds of my story but still unspoken. Thank you for voicing this.
Sharon - thank you as ever for being a writer in our project here, but also for the way you read and respond to others here. That's what makes this undertaking richer than I myself could ever have made it. xx
I write because I need to be consumed and subsumed by something bigger than my entity. I want to mend the severance of my grief and bridge a chasm of desolation with curiosity and exploration. I want to reach through the shrouds of loneliness and beyond the masks of coping to empathy for others. I write because I have no other God to call upon for safety, succour, or salvation.
Every morning I wake up to lumpy thoughts swirling into syllables which then mould themselves as words. When I write, I face my irascible monsters and turn them into pets. I listen to them, stroke them and encircle them with love as they doze by my side. I am grateful for my fears, grief, loss and loneliness because each facet plays it’s part to rebuild, renew, restore me. Writing helps me to pause my judgements and cultivate compassion, not just for other people, but also for my past, present and future self. Through writing, I have learned to tell my truth in a way that I’ve never had the courage to reveal verbally. I think of the process as a loving labour like revealing a rough gemstone’s glory by cutting, polishing, setting and wearing.
I’m challenged by ineptitude, self-doubts and a total absence of hope to write one single word of worth. Writing questions my validity, yet words ratify my existence. There are days when I am overwhelmed by doubt and paralysed by fear, preventing me from writing. I ask myself “Why is this hard and what am I scared of?” Then, I capture all codswallop tumbling from my mind and give my brain free reign and rein to splurge it’s jumbled pain. Just like the contents of a drawer tipped upon the floor, each thought is gathered, studied and recorded. Emotions are woven into words to create a cord to form a chord for a reader.
The next phase is taking my piece to my writing group for feedback. When joining such a group was first suggested I reacted with a severe panic attack. Within an hour of internet research I’d found a group online and had approached the organiser for joining details. It’s the only way I know to overcome my anxieties. Within twenty-four hours I was sitting in front of my computer listening to incredible people reading their work and listening to feedback. It took me a month before I set myself the goal of presenting a piece to the group. Now, I look forward to people telling me what they need more of and where they think I can improve. I relish the exposure a lazy or cliched sentence and immediately get excited about how I can re-write, improve and think deeper about what I really want to convey and how best to deliver. Despite my craving for connection, I’m filled with awe when others express that I have touched them.
Shazz! What a blast of energy and beautiful prose from you - your first time writing for the project too I think?
There is such momentum in your process as you describe it here: I admire that, as someone who has had to take a complete break from writing this last year.
This line in particular is beautiful to me: 'Emotions are woven into words to create a cord to form a chord for a reader.' Gorgeous, touching on several senses at once.
And my admiration to you for joining the writing group for feedback: I never had the courage to do this, and I see now how it slowed down my development as a writer, keeping things too private and not having any safe place to test my ideas and my prose out. (Why I've set up this project, so others will have a starting place for that).
This month's prompt is the only one where I won't be curating responses over on The Cure for Sleep website, as I'm wanting people to feel they can speak freely of deep concerns and tender places when it comes to writing and what it means to them.
But based on this piece by you, how much I hope you will start responding to themes in the archive - I will so enjoy publishing your work and giving you direct links to them so you can use them when sharing word of your writing life or applying for other courses...
Thank you so much for your wonderful message. Yes, it is my very first engagement with your project and I certainly am forming a plan to incorporate archived themes as a part of my writing routine. I am new to writing. I started in lockdown in response to my lovely and "bossy" Aunt who wanted me to write of my experiences living in Pakistan. Once I transcribed my journals, I then set out an action plan to learn the craft of writing. This has evolved and progressed to where I am right now, following you and enjoying applying myself to your themes. Thank you for setting up the project. It's really great to be a part of it.
This is wonderful. I especially loved the first three sentences of the second paragraph. Also, I never would have verbalized writing as a way to compassion for self and others, but that is it exactly. I always appreciate writing that makes me think differently, open up. Also, admire the courage of joining a writing group! xx
Dear Sheila thank you so much for your encouragement and supportive comments about my writing. You've really boosted my motivation to engage further and challenge myself. Reading your post has made a beautiful start to my day. Thank you x
I love this line: " I write because I have no other God to call upon for safety, succour, or salvation." And this one: "When I write, I face my irascible monsters and turn them into pets. I listen to them, stroke them and encircle them with love as they doze by my side." So much beautiful prose here. I envy your courage in joining a writing group -- it's on my list of things I must do! You've given me some great food for thought as I continue on my own writer's journey.
Hello Anne. I'd love it if you felt able to respond to this invitation. I do need responses to be given here via comments, but I don't have to curate them over on the cure for sleep site as I usually do with contributions to the other themes. So while this is an online forum, it's very tightly moderated by me - i get notifications of every new post, and can delete entirely and block anything/anyone who is not acting in the supportive spirit of the project.
I think it's also part of what I offer aspiring writers: can you find a way to write deep and sometimes tender truths and put them out into (modest/safe) public space? It's a safe way to test out how it feels to move from private expression or student/teacher sharings into speaking to a larger readership.
So I appreciate you may want to respond to this prompt perhaps just in your own journalling process. Another way I'd be able perhaps to hear you on this will be when I can next open up applications for free or paid mentoring: this is a question I ask all prospective mentees to respond to as part of the selection process. No dates coming up, but I'd always let my Substack community know first when I'm opening those up again.
Yes - for this prompt only I've decided not to curate responses over on the open cure for sleep site. While non-subscribers can read this Substack, they can't comment, and in reality I think very few non-active members of the community read all the nested replies. And now I think there's a submission from you waiting for me to read! xx
I write because what if as I began to piece together the first white gossamer shreds of memory, they are ripped away, leaving nothing of my beginnings by blackness, a slight limp and a distinctive laugh?
I have no memory of my original mothers voice, but there were times growing up when a familiar intonation, a wind blown conversation brought on a sharp intake of breath, and an almost unstoppable need to find its origin. I was caught between the desire to follow the voice and the dark shadow of abandonment. It set the rhythm of my days and it took a lifetime to change it.
For the first 40 years of my life, my bloodline was unknown to me, grafted onto a branch of English archbishops, genealogists, itinerant Norwegian weavers , professors, inventors, explorers, restless men, and unhappy women.
But the music of my beginnings would not let me be. It hummed through open windows, piped up through my bare feet and plucked my untamed hair. It came in the drone of the dulcimers strings in the songs of Ann Grimes, an early collector of Appalachia, music, and mother of my best friend, Sally. It came out in a cadence of a Carney man’s call, in the fire lit stories the tramps and travelers told stopping by the Olentangy River on their seasonal journey from southern mountains. It arrived in the bales of freshly shorn sheep‘s fleeces, in the whirl of the spinning wheel, and the sissing sound the threads made as they slipped through the hand set a reeds of a 100 year old loom. All these things were carefully piled at the edge of memory. They so changed the hue of the blackness that abandonment lost its power.
I stepped beyond the carefully laid out prison walls of my beginning to start the journey.
My earliest memories revolved around a black emptiness from whose edges blew a dry, cold ice like mist. When I was older and could use the dictionary, I was able to name this place which lies back of the beyond.
It was oblivion, the state of being forgotten.
My challenges are time, beginnings and endings….
Will I, at 82 be able to put all I found, in readable form.
Hi Susan I've just read your beautiful piece. Your words dance through my mind like lyrics. You've said so much about pain and emptiness, yet your words are filled with hope.
And to answer your question - Yes, I think and feel you are already doing just that.
...and thank you to you, Shazz, for reading and responding this way to Susan's words. Each time members of the project do this for one another, it amplifies and deepens the power of what we're all doing here: having a sense of readers other than me makes it so much more valuable for contributors. xx
Susan... it means so much to me that you've joined this project as a contributor, and especially now in these tender days after the end of our rich Hagitude year. I already loved and admired your writing from what you have shared on that forum, but to receive this very complete and powerful piece of prose here, now? If your last line has a silent question:
'Will I, at 82, be able to put all I found, in readable form?
My answer, without hesitation, is: Yes. Yes. You already are. This is readable. This has form, and force. You have given us a sense of place, and a sense too of a mystery in your life that we, your readers, will care to learn more about. That will speak to similar, differently located puzzles in our own lives.
With regard to age: Do you know Florida Scott-Maxwell's The Measure of My Days? It's hard to get here in the UK but second-hand copies might be easier where you are. Also not easy to get but worthwhile: Hope L Bourne's Wild Harvest (she was a woman who lived alone & self-sufficient on Exmoor). The artist Anne Truitt's journal series also covers her 70s I believe. And May Sarton's published diaries cover her 80s as well as earlier decades. These to give you a sense of peers - but in other respects, I feel your voice and your themes have much in common with younger writers I admire immensely: Melissa Febos, Carmen Maria Machado... one of the joys of writing is that we can write away from as well as out of our age, I think...
I'm not curating responses to this month's theme over on the cure for sleep website as I usually do as I'm wanting to use my time to give more detailed feedback and suggestions than I normally do. But any contributions to themes in the archive that (I hope!) you make will be curated as normal.
Wow! I made sure not to read what anyone else wrote until I posted something because I didn't want to be intimidated. I'm glad I made that choice because this is simply beautiful. The women in my life were not able to set an example of retaining a vitality while aging so I search out examples on my own....and this is just that, reassurance of the beauty in aging and the creativity that remains. This is poetic and heartfelt and and lovely. I want to read more! xx
I owe the elders in my life so much gratitude...both those who continued to do the “one foot in front of the other” dance and those who took to their beds. Perhaps the most memorable one was an artist, a mentor, and in her final years put down her brush and never painted again because her work no longer met her critical eye. And I saw the carving away of extraneous strokes, pure line. And I promised my self that would not happen... that I would die with pen, brush, needle in hand. And so...
Oh my goodness, this is amazing, I would love to read more, it is so rich and intoxicating and exciting...it feels like the first chapter of something wonderful and profound...please go on...
Before I was ten, I developed a survival strategy for all the images I could not hold up in the mirror. I was only in touch with the devouring aspect of the mother who gobbles up everything. I thought whatever she could not see, she could not devour.
I kept these thoughts, feelings, and sensations hidden in a journal. I wrote constantly, vigilantly. My journal was like a confidential secretary recording the story of my true self. It became a mirror where I could see and feel my truth resonating in my daily experience. The confusion, guilt, and anger I could not express verbally was processed through writing. Writing held my body and soul together. It was the only way for my true self to survive.
Being female meant being a servant like my mother when she was a girl. My mother was born in Northern Ireland. She was one of the youngest of nine children from a poor farmer's family. My mother worked in private homes as a domestic, washing and cleaning for families until she came to live with an aunt in America.
I could only get my mother's approval when I was "useful." She praised me when I was mother's little helper; she would fondly call me her" Right Hand Man." I was valued when I cleaned, ironed, or folded laundry. She made me believe that my only role in life was to be of service. To please her, I rejected aspects of myself, like creativity and femininity. The creative-maternal feminine does not exist in the devouring mother.
Because of the many household chores, I wrote stories, poems, and plays. I could feel pleasure by staying in my head; it was a way of dissociating. She would become furious if she caught me "scribbling," taking away from the efficiency of my chores. She would shred whatever I wrote. Any display of creativity threatened her. So, I learned to keep this pleasurable inner life hidden. Mother's approval came only from my chores and how quickly they were accomplished. The negative mother hates joy, and to do anything that one enjoys produces guilt.
She feared I would create, explore, or enjoy the world's sensual pleasures. If I did get caught in a moment of pleasure, she would scold me and make me feel guilty, call me selfish, useless, and good for nothing to keep me in my place.
One day, when I was ten, my mother sent me on an errand to buy potatoes. I went to the store on my bicycle with a friend. In that moment of guilty pleasure, I fell off the bike and broke my right arm. I remember sitting on the railroad tracks with my friend crying, not because I was in pain. Being right-handed was a gift and a curse. Not writing for a few months seemed unimaginable, so I scrawled with my left hand in defiant rebellion against the right-hand man as a servant to my writing.
Anne... this is a deeply moving piece of work, but also (this is the editor & writer in me responding) accomplished story-telling. I get the same feeling of place and circumstance and surprising growth-despite-constraints that I value in the work of Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping, Lila, Gilead) and also in Stoner by John Williams. Do you know this book? I most often recommend it to men I mentor, because it awards deep attention and care to the inner live of an obscure, quiet, good man - rare in this respect I feel. But now I feel that it would speak to you and keep you good company in your creative life if you don't already know it.
Stoner is born into an impoverished farming family during depression: the only child. When a farm agent suggests he should go to agricultural college to study soil health, the parents grace his going though they hardly use words. But then Stoner gets a calling to devote his life to literature. The scene where he breaks it to his parents after graduation that he won't be returning to the farm but working instead in academia... it is understated and absolutely devastating... the blow to them because of the brutality of the work made worse by losing his strength, but more so what it costs him to own that need in himself...:
[I've just run downstairs to fetch it for you]
'Stoner tried to explain to his father what he intended to do, tried to evoke in him his own sense of significance and purpose. He listened to his words fall as if from the mouth of another, and watched his father's face, which received those words as a stone receives the repeated blows of a fist. When he had finished he sat with his head bowed. He listened to the silence of the room.
Finally his father moved in his chair. Stoner looked up. His parents' faces confronted him; he almost cried out to them. '
The remaining few paragraphs of that scene are heartrending and understated and contain a whole time and place as well as the story of those three people. I'll leave you to discover the rest yourself, if it speaks to you. And if you already know and love it, then I want you to know I felt your prose here has a similar strength.
On your need to keep your rich inner life hidden: I'm curious to know how or if that affects you now in terms of sharing your work with others? Does it make it harder to share your words? Or is there a pleasure in feeling your creative self survived and can now come out to play? Or something else entirely? I'd be interested to hear more...
Thank you Tanya, no I have not even heard of the book Stoner, but I will certainly order it. I'm very interested. I did not know about Marilynn Robinson either. Will look into both writers.
I'm getting better at sharing my work. I used to be very guarded, but I've given myself more permission in past few years. Sometimes when it feels too personal, I hesitate. Yes, there is certainly a pleasure in feeling my creative self survived and is still thriving! Yes, just the other day I realized it is about being able to come out and play, it doesn't need any other purpose than that! Thank you for your encouragement.💖
Come out and play! Love this... and yes, yes to that. As a child who had to become more serious at a young age that was my natural temperament, I share this wish to find ways to play now at midlife! xx
I really like how you've cleverly woven together the references to the 'right hand' here. First the idea of being the reluctant 'right-hand man' servant to your mother, and then, while having fun and just being a kid, you break your right arm, and rebel by learning to write with your left. It felt like the girl was shaking her left fist at having to be a servant, and saying 'no! I'm not who you think I am!' Very nicely done and a good way to make this piece feel like it has a clear thread running through it.
I put pen in my hand and suddenly I'm a river where before I was a couch. The words come forth and flow. Confessions, songs, journeys, poems. Elemental talk, dreams, character arc, Gaia's whispers. Divination, inner stories, outward observations, news of the world. Confessions and Prayers. For this I must write. Mystical visions and spirit callings. For this I must write. Poetic visions and gateways with words. For this I must write. Stream of consciousness and voices of the wild. For this I must write. To live and to let die. For this I must write. To create and to conjure. For this I must write.
I put pen in my hand and suddenly I'm a waterfall where before I was a dam. The words come forth and insist to be known, to be recognized. The page is a record playing the song I hear in me and in you. The typeset is a sculpture, a work of written art that took form and gave me flight. This is why I write.
I am in the midst of writing my first book titled Living Within the Beauty of the Earth. It is a work of nonfiction composed along with Nature. I discovered my poetic self in 7th grade English and I have written ever since. Writing is the river that confesses and reworks my emotional life. Writing is a way to express my soul path and mission to be a co creator with Gaia Earth. I was a paraeducator for 22 years and made the conscious choice at age 51 to resign. While navigating the uncertainty of my life after leaving the safety of a mainstream job and its revenue stream, a strong voice inside kept showing up to say your work in the world now should be tied to writing. I can be in service to Nature in this medium of writing. It is a soul calling and I am listening and following through with courage and joy. I am a writer and I feel like that has always been with me at the core. It is who I am and it is a liberating thing to declare it as my main work and purpose in the world.
Suzanne! Welcome to our community here - and what a joyous first contribution.
This month's prompt is different in that I'm not curating pieces over on the cure for sleep website, from wanting to give people a chance to speak to a more closed group of their struggles in writing or sharing work once they have. But if you write for any of the other themes in the project it will be my pleasure to curate them into the story archive.
Your prose has the force and energy and movement of the natural sources that your celebrate. I will love seeing more work from you here, and how your style and sensibility responds to them.
Thank you, Tanya! Your work here is a gift to writers everywhere. It is truly an amazing offering you give to let writers share on your platform. I discovered you through Sharon Blackie's recommendation on her substack. I'm looking forward to reading your book!
I really like the image you create of putting the pen in your hand and boom! a river, or boom! a waterfall. That's so powerful. I also really relate to turning 50+, leaving your career and knowing writing must be part of the rest of your life. That's true for me, too. Your book sounds fascinating and I look forward to reading more of your contributions.
Thank you for your kind words, Wendy! It feels so supportive to know you are having a similar experience with a career change leading to a mighty call for writing to be in the driver's seat of your life! I look forward to reading your work here as well!
It wasn’t there when I first said ‘mama’ or crawled, stood, then stepped; it’s not in the pictures.
But its black brick foundation was already laid when I was the girl in the yellow sandbox, collecting ladybugs by day and scribbling in my journal by night.
Sections of it guarded me at school, keeping secrets safe, and while I sat on the top cellar step, light streaming in under the locked door.
At eighteen, newly homeless, all glimmers of privilege faded; I finished the wall with black crack-resistant caulk and never looked back.
But then came the curtain. A thin, white veil, a haze separating me from everyone – except, I would learn later, from my children, my current husband, and my Labrador. Invisible, this gauzy layer could turn thick, suffocating me, my words.
An achiever, I functioned highly. After all, one must have friends, holidays, careers, and love; The Myth of Normal, says Gabor. So, I created a good life on the other side of the wall, where, tangled in the white curtain, I lived to work.
While my head led the way, my body stored the pain. My heart, she was busy caring for others. And my spirit, she’d run away.
You see, I thought I’d freed myself.
It’s only just now, thirty-three years later, as I write this response to your prompt like when I was a student, do I fully understand:
I sealed my Self inside the wall and installed a curtain to detach.
__
The wall fell on January 6, 2020. My body said, ‘No more.’ My head shouted, ‘Save the body! We must live to work!’ And, my heart, well, it was in bits, like the red rose petals we scattered across my mother’s coffin two months before.
She died in a car crash, smashing the wall and me.
I don’t remember when I came to. I guess that depends upon what it means to be awake. Is the white curtain still supposed to be there?
If so, then it was just this summer when, in a final push, I asked a healer for help.
Three handwritten letters later, so thick they struggled to burn, I sat with a shiatsu practitioner. As if requesting a simple repair, I explained: ‘My mind, spirit, and heart are finally connected, but my body isn’t following…Can you help?’
A miracle: the quartet reunited and the curtain dropped. There in my body, where I’d never looked, was me, beginning with the girl in the yellow sandbox.
This is why I write; why I can and must write now.
Others have walls and curtains; maybe if I share, they can dismantle theirs and find themselves before they crash.
It’s just working out how to explain it all.
Permission to expose the madness: my final frontier.
Capture it on the page, give it a cover, and release it once and for all.
At least, I think that’s what might happen; you tell me.
Such a powerful description of how you - how so many of us in different ways - create those compartments/containers/rooms to stay safe through childhood til we can get free. It is a physical building of structures - I felt that too (and there's a line in my book where I describe, at 9, dividing into two: my inner self wanted only to sleep and be rescued; the other one...
'...was a sturdy girl...who went to school like a man to a mine, or farmer to his field. Education as a manual labour, through which – lesson by lesson, year by year – I’d tunnel beyond home and town.'
The cortisol and adrenalin my system was flooded with led to years of infections, sleeplessness, depersonalisation...
So I have some understanding of what work, what risk, what courage it is taking for you to be bringing your body, your memory, your voice together and then beginning to share your writing.
I can't know if it is coincidence, but I do know that my chronic joint pain and constant infections ceased six months or so after publication of the book, once all the immediate worry and demands of publishing receded. And have stayed away since. To write the book made all those symptoms much much worse - 17 weeks in bed in 2021: often swollen as if I'd been in an accident. But now: I feel so free, so at ease and better able to handle life challenges as they come (as they always do).
I love the challenge of your last line: 'At least I think that's what might happen; you tell me'.
I can't of course: I can only say, as I have, what happened for me. But I hope very much that this project will be one of the places where you can explore that what next...
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Tanya. It feels so welcoming, this space, and to know that you, and others here, have a sense of what it takes to bring all of yourself together and share your stories with others. I'm sorry to hear that you also suffered chronic pain issues; I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia a long time ago, but never realized the cause until several years ago. At the moment writing is providing a sense of freedom from the past and of/for the present and future, but, as I write my memoir, which I'm now beginning, I imagine that there will be ebbs and flows - more to be learned along the way, of that I am sure. Thank you again.
Hi Tanya, I am now further along in your book; to where your pain becomes a theme. As I read, I can’t help but feel a connection; although we’ve led completely different lives, there’s something so familiar. I am grateful for the effort and care with which you share your story. Now I’ll continue reading...
I write for my children. To show them that they can know themselves and their own hearts.
I write to understand the world and my tiny place in it. To find something. Anything. To fill the vastness.
I write to find peace and silence. To soothe.
I write to explore my feelings and emotions, to listen to my heart beat.
I write to quiet the noise, the storms that often stop me in my tracks
I write to shut my noisy thoughts, to calm the chaotic chatter. Get it all out.
I write to define love and find meaning in my existence.
I write to clear the clutter, to carve a path through the messiness that often fills my mind.
I write to write myself out, to heal my heart and pain.
I write to remember, loves lost, people gone forever, to celebrate life and joy.
I write to honour my life and those that have walked it with me.
I write to to be curious, long lists of dreams and plans, hopes and fears. To consider what comes next.
I write to feel the pen in my hand and see the ink on the page, a physical act.
I write for comfort. To speak my absolute truth. A safe space. A haven.
I write to speak the unsaid. The things that I can only say to myself. The hidden parts of my soul.
I write to problem solve, to ask questions of my life and look for answers, patterns.
I write to create, to explore words and sentences. To fulfil a part of me that yearns to make something.
I write to find hope, to revisit the darkest times and find light in their passing.
I write to find energy. The energy to move through this life.
I write because it pushes me to the limits of myself, it challenges me to press against the outer boundary of safety and comfort. Like dipping myself in the grey icy winter sea, I seek in mid life to push back the edges of me. Of what I am capable of.
I write to re-define who I am. To change. To become better. To become myself.
I don’t write because I need to be anywhere or travel with it. This act is enough.
Helen... fascinating: I first read submissions as they come through to me as emails: they don't have the same formatting there that they do over here on Substack, so I later click through and look at them again as part of responding with my reader feedback.
This piece by you had such an incredible force driving through it, an incantatory quality, so that I began to read it out loud to better feel and enjoy that aspect of it. I had a huge smile then to see it here, with the formatting you intended, because instead of one large paragraph that I first read, I see that you intended it to have that poetic form and declarative aspect.
What I love is that even with the formatting not there initially, I could still tell - from the quality of your prose - what you intended. That's a rare thing.
I felt the kind of energy that runs through Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison. And I'm curious to know which writers you feel most in the company of? It might be very different ones to these of course...
Ah thanks Tanya as always for your lovely and generous feedback. I don’t really know who my favourite writers are these days to be honest- I am drawn a lot to short form writers though. That might be due to time more than anything though at the moment. I didn’t write anything but my journals for years until I discovered your project and it’s been such a positive experience so again, thankyou for your generosity creating it xxx
I love this! The way you have set it out as a chant is brilliant but also how much you are able to say in a limited space. Your line “I write to speak the unsaid” really resonates with me, as well as “writing pushes me to the limits of myself”, with its vivid analogy of dipping yourself in the icy sea.
A wonderful manifesto to all the reasons to write. My favorite l was "I write to write myself out," because I felt there are so many ways to interpret this line, sometimes writing myself out as a discovery and other times just writing myself out as a wringing myself out of all of the self perpetuating, weary thoughts. I'll be carrying this line with me today. Also thought the last line was perfect. It is enough just to write...
Writing has always been tied to my sense of self. A published writer is all I ever wanted to be.
But for years, my creative writing self was stuck. When words did come, unbidden and fleeting like late summer butterflies, I struggled to catch them, fix them into something permanent. I didn’t mind, I had time, the words would reappear when the time was right.
Yet oncoming age has changed everything; there is now an increasing rhythmic insistence. If Virginia Woolf’s head was “a hive of words that won’t settle”, then mine has the ceaseless thrum of a woodpecker’s drilling beak, rattling my brain and nervous system.
I need to steadily set things down to empty my mind and still the noise.
I need to tell my story and carefully pass it on to my daughter, so she can one day read and understand why the newspaper headlines didn't tell the full story of that chapter in my life.
By writing, I can shape my narrative with my own hands. To say how it really felt. To become the heroine of my own story, as Nora Ephron once suggested.
In a world spinning out on its axis, writing can offer control. It can also sometimes exorcise demons, allowing me to meet my monsters out in the open, to do battle on the blank page.
As a naturally quiet person I’ve learnt to speak up, but I rarely voice the words I want to say. For fear of being misunderstood or thought too intense, too boring, just too much. By writing my feelings down I can make better sense of them and occasionally channel them into something fluent, more eloquent than I can say out loud.
I try not to be constrained by the people whose censure used to worry me and hinder my writing. But now I’m the one putting up the barriers, getting in my own way when my writing is unable to capture the images in my head.
As my creative self asks me what am I trying to say, yet refuses to help me find the right words and mocks my endeavours to put my writing into the world. Taunting me with embarrassment that I’ve laid my soul so bare and given so much away which I can never get back.
So that now, whilst writing the book I’ve recently started, my doubts sneer and threaten so that I wonder if I will ever finish it. Writing creatively is hard when my sense of self is such a contradictory creature...
Yet, despite this, I'm compelled to keep going. As if I don’t do it, I won’t quite know who I really am.
Davina, so very moved by what you've written here - that interplay of necessity, determination with embarrassment, vulnerability...
Do you have quotes from other writers copied out by hand or printed out and stuck up in view/stuck into your writing book? I always need to have them nearby to remind me that even the Nobel Laureates, even the famous authors of our time, go through this. And not just for their first books.
If you haven't already read it, do do do get Steinbeck's Diary of a Novel (I think that's the title: it's a journal he kept alongside the writing of East of Eden - the book of his place and people he'd been wanting to write for his sons - as you want to write for your daughter - all his life). For days before the book starts, you see him in the diary fiddling about, sharpening pencils, sitting with the fear of beginning. It is such a rich process book.
I also find this quote from Jeanette Winterson in her Paris Review interview coming to mind as I read you:
WINTERSON
Whenever we talk about writing, we start to talk about paradoxes. We’ve talked about respect and challenge. Now we are talking about chutzpah and humility. The writer is at once the most abject of people and the most arrogant. Because the person who really knows, knows the glories of the past and how significant they are to him or her, is at the same time prepared to say, And now I will add to them.
I love this from her as it speaks to both sides of what it takes to persist with our stories of our times and places (as she began her long career by writing of her people in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit).
Also take a look at this great short film from the Paris Review My First Time series. Sheila Heti describing the strange and feverish processes she improvised to make her first book...
I'm not curating pieces into the cure for sleep website with this month's theme as I'm spending more time giving detailed responses here than usual. But any pieces you write for themes in the archive will be curated as usual
Thank you so much for your careful, detailed and generous feedback, Tanya. I definitely should make a habit of writing down/sticking up quotes from other authors about writing! Despite reading a few books about the writing process (Graham Swift’s “Writing an elephant” was a particular favourite), it will be cathartic to read more.
And you’ve aptly selected two of my favourite writers to read more of: Steinbeck and Jeanette Winterson. Shamefully I hadn’t heard of either Steinbeck’s diary book (how did I miss that?) or Winterson’s interview - but I’m looking forward to finding both & reading them.
I found Sheila Heti’s thoughts in the short film quite insightful. Especially the line - “In what ways do you need to trick yourself into writing this book.” That was very revealing and also helpful for me to hear that.
Thank you once again & best wishes for your upcoming birthday!
My voice is girlish, with a lisp that leaks into tired or nervous lines and I never know which accent to use; the clipped cockney of my Portsmouth childhood; the arch drawl I caught at the expensive school I was sent to; the ironic snarl I affected whilst trying to be cool in London, or the rolling burr of rural Dorset where I have lived for the last thirty years? This indecisive voice depends on the company it is keeping. It tries too hard to fit in.
My mother said I didn’t talk until I was well past three. She took me to an educational psychologist who told her not to worry.
On paper or on the laptop screen the “voice” is mine alone. One I couldn’t quite describe until Tanya did! “Disquieting”. That’s it! Upsetting the quiet. Using humour to unsettle. To share. To communicate something in an entertaining and memorable way.
The scrape of a sharp pencil or the yielding tap of my rose gold keyboard are sounds that give birth to a voice I am learning to prefer. One that thinks before it speaks, that makes the wrong comment disappear so nothing can embarrass or trample around my head at dawn. My written voice is not, of course, perfect; it doesn’t always know the right word or express emotions exactly, but it’s a better voice; more authentic, less affected.
I am tired of hearing my spoken voice. Tucked into my mental attic is an enormous archive of amusing anecdotes and small talk for any occasion. A writer doesn’t have to fill space. A writer listens. A writer is calm. Staying silent is a challenge. “You’re weird today” “Are you yourself?” friends ask and I perform to show I am.
Capturing and recording other people’s words is not a challenge. I have notebooks stuffed with absorbing quotes and observations. Finding a suitable home for them is hard, however, but not impossible. The skill lies in stopping them spilling out before they are ready .
Sometimes I feel swamped with material. Everything seems fascinating, extraordinary or meaningful. I accept every invitation because I know there will be material lurking in the corner. Something to store in a notebook or swill around my memory. Since stopping full-time work I have participated in all kinds of odd pastimes, meetings, workshops or part-time roles. Not for the money, or the companionship, or even the exercise. Simply for the glorious oddness that exists in the apparently sleepy market where I live. Death cafes, pickleball, estate agents, everything is full of stories that compete for attention. Today is my sixty-fourth birthday and I am acutely aware of the passing of time. I want to edit my novel “Act Your Age”, finish a collection of short stories “Endgames”, create an online profile, and keep myself fit and alive. Writing, not speaking, is living for me. Becoming a silent three-year-old again.
Rosalyn, once again you move me with your distinct prose - this gift you have for weaving together vivid and yes unsettling glimpses of the past with authorial perspective on how that past has formed you. That second paragraph... how much you do in it.
Do, please, take a look at this extraordinary short film featuring Christine Schutt for the Paris Review's My First Time series. How clear she is about her 60s coming up, and why she needed to commit to her writing for good as she didn't in her 20s. But why I'm recommending it in particular is for the body language as much as what she says. It compelled me so much that I transcribed the interview adding all of her gestures in as well. The way she touches her throat, shakes her head. A lot of what she is talking about is how she was spoken to and how close she came to stopping. It's a strange sort of birthday gift to be offering you but one I think you will respond to...
I'm not curating pieces for this theme only as I want the chance to give more detailed feedback than usual. But anything you write for the other ones in the archive will be moved across and linked to as before.
I write to celebrate the startle of orange chicken of the woods mushrooms, the walk home through the tree shaded paths with my T-shirt made into a basket, the sauteing with garlic, the cream, salt and pepper, fresh rosemary and shredded Parmesan on steaming pasta. To remember the feeling of picking my son up at the airport after a year away, late afternoon kayaking and the loud smack of a beaver tail. To remember the thin film of flour on the counter, my aproned daughter sparkling with sugar, always happiest when baking.
I write because life cycles by and cycles through and it's so easy to forget the golden parts and writing is the only way through the dark parts.
Because writing can hold what cannot be said. Writing doesn’t tell me I’m crazy, doesn’t say, “I will,” and then doesn’t. Writing doesn’t walk away.
Because I live timidly in small circles that long to ripple out across a pond filled with the haunting wail of loons.
Because I want more.
I write because thoughts move in and circle like vultures. I write because words trail along with me on walks, drop heavy like October hickory nuts and are sometimes hidden in the tapestry of fallen leaves, words brown and yellow, and sometimes bold scattered reds. I write because words are irrepressible and hang about like a cross squirrel with flagging tail if not released onto the page. And because by this time of my life I’ve repeated my stories too many times, and they’ve become just that: a story I tell, lacking emotional truth, told to make sure others don’t feel uncomfortable.
I write because I love the edits, the changes, watching words become more when gathered and rearranged. I write because metaphor allows the truth to be told without shaming people who loved me the best that they could. Writing pushes me out of my comfort zone even though the words sometimes collapse in on themselves. Nothing is ever wasted.
I write because women before me were silenced and because other women dare to share and their courage inspires.
I write because it is mine.
And yet, I am challenged by being born responsible for others, a heart laid claim to before its first beat, the enduring pull to protect, do the right thing, prove worth. I am challenged by to-do lists, work, chickens to feed, laundry, dirty floors and an insistent dog. I buy the groceries and cook the food. I clean the toilet and write the bills. Even when the list is done, there's the challenge of believing, the persistent doubt that tells me it’s all been written, I could spend this time learning something useful. Sometimes I fear the truth that will be uncovered. I hold back, not wanting to hurt anyone more than I have, knowing I can’t tell everyone’s truth and the truth changes.
Sheila, tears reading this - the sort that have nothing to do with happy or sad or worried, but are to do with being party to someone showing their gift for a thing. You are a true writer. I've known it since your first piece came through, but this makes me feel urgent about your work. Please, please - whatever your other writing project plans - please, Sheila, will you write a book about food? About cooking? There's a way it's not written about enough, and you can do it. I have a hungry feeling just saying it. If you write it, I would be first in line as a first reader and supporter (should you need me for that).
'the startle of orange chicken of the woods mushrooms'... 'Because I live timidly in small circles that long to ripple out across a pond filled with the haunting wail of loons.' ... 'metaphor allows the truth to be told without shaming people who loved me the best that they could' - this is such exciting writing.
While I don't often read novels, and not the bestseller sort, I gave a whole day in the gardens at the bottom of town last year very happily to Where The Crawdads Sing. Some clunky plot devices aside, it worked a spell of time and place on me. I was there: a landscape and culture I've never known. You can do this too: perhaps writing about food, prepared in response to the comings and goings of tasks, a dog, loved ones, is another way you can work with short scenes or stories as you said you want to, while still creating a long form work?
Tanya, Once again, blown away by your comments. It's difficult to explain how it feels to have grown up feeling like I had no creativity at all, to finding out that I like to write, and then to having someone with your skill offer me up so much encouragement. My heart swells with gratitude to you. I had been thinking of ways to structure a project since my writing (even the stuff that I do that isn't part of your project) just seems like random responses to daily life and past memories that float up. I was thinking of using the Pre-nest, Nest, and Post-nest pieces I shared here as section markers to sort of make sense of what I was writing. I think food writing would definitely fit into that, but I'm also intrigued with just writing about food too. So much to write about there.....Jeff (my husband) was diagnosed with cancer when he was 31, Emily was nearly 2, and Jesse was due in about three months. Jeff is still alive and well, but was when I got serious about food and health, cooking as love. I'm so excited by the opportunities that you offered up here as different approaches to writing. I would love to have you be a first reader and laughed when you offered supporter should I need one. I feel quite certain of needing support. I really look forward to you potentially offering a class in the new year. Until then, I'll keep writing and see what I end up with. Looking forward to having you in the kitchen sometime in 2024! Thank you so much! xxx
...glad I said what I was thinking/intuiting about the importance of food, your kitchen. Moved to learn now when that began to be so, and why. And when (not if) I arrived at your backdoor... what a special feeling that will be, to be in this place that lives so brightly in my imagination now. xxx
Writing has been a gift and a lesson in the act and art of noticing.
Every time I write, it’s an opportunity to observe the transience and yet enduring persistence of the everyday. It’s all at once the comforting clasp of a tiny hand and the dull ache of longing and grief. Through writing, I can hold the weight of joy and despair in both hands and feel their outline. Above all it’s a reminder to grasp hold of the novelty and awe that we so often lose as adults.
My writing journey began with learning how to read. As a child, I was often found hiding in a corner, head down immersed in a book. Reading was all at once an escape, a place of solace and a welcome distraction. It became a magical way to dive deep into fantastical otherworldly places and to make sense of the world around me. As my messy handwriting evolved alongside my reading, secret scribbles and scraps of poems appeared on the page in determined scratchy, spidery marks.
Eight-year-old me dreamt of writing and I would copy out my favourite books. Yet in my teens writing became something secretive and furtive, adolescent self-consciousness and a desire to break away from family ties, led me to throw many notebooks away in rebellion. Years passed and I swallowed down my desire to write, pushing it aside in pursuit of independence and a career. But the words were always there, jangling in my pockets like loose change.
It was not until the arrival of my first-born that I returned to writing. Becoming a parent opened the floodgates to the words that had long remained dormant. My notes app became filled with 3AM thoughts, threads of poems and lines of prose that would not settle until I had captured them. Yet writing whilst mothering presented a whole new world of challenges; from the perpetual interruption to the bone-aching sleep deprivation, from the loss of identity to the pervasive and intrusive feelings of guilt and imposter syndrome to name a few. During the first few years, I found it hard to let go and lean into the interruption, frustration would seep into my writing and I grieved the lack of space and time to create. Yet for any writer, time presents itself as a slippery creature and over the years, I’ve come to value time’s elasticity and luminosity. From the snatched early moments when I rise before the rest of the house and write for fifteen minutes to the pockets of time that appear as I fall asleep, no matter how long I leave it, I can always return to the page.
As I enter a new season of my mothering journey, I’ve come to view my writing with compassion and to value its unerring companionship. The perpetual interruptions of life will always be there, so I try to welcome them in and invite them to kindle my curiosity and fuel my desire to write.
Thank you for joining us here, Lucy, and with this beautiful first contribution (and if you respond to any of the others in the archive, I will be glad to curate them over on the cure for sleep website: it's only with this one that I'm not doing that, as I wanted to spend more time giving more detailed feedback than usual, for those who've identified blocks or struggles).
I love the lifelong sense of you as a reader and writer you share with us here, and was moved in particular by the beauty and wisdom of this line towards the end: 'As I enter a new season of my mothering journey, I’ve come to view my writing with compassion and to value its unerring companionship.' Our writing as a steadfast presence even as our other relationships ebb and flow. How wonderful.
Thank you so much Tanya for the welcome and your lovely words and for taking the time to read my words... It always feels so terrifying sharing and I often find myself running to the hills and hiding away with a big vulnerability hangover whenever I’ve shared something. This space and community is truly magical and I can’t wait to join in properly and respond to the rest of the prompts. Thanks again and sending you best wishes from a very wild and windy Cornwall x
I will so enjoy receiving more from you whenever you have time and interest. I'm glad I decided early on to keep all themes open - it means those of you arriving here in Year 3 can soon feel to have been as fully part of the project as folk who wrote for the first prompts back in 2021. I also think writing deadlines - necessary though they are for Prizes - stop a lot of talent finding an audience because the deadlines rarely fit with our full-time work, or caring responsibilities...
Wild and windy Cornwall... oh, heart tug. Though I love Sussex and am fully settled here now 30 years, til August I always had Mum back there. So the long drive there and back had to be done and done often. Now... I think it will be a while til I'm there again. But I do miss 'the real sea' as I think of it... xx
"... the words were always there, jangling in my pockets like loose change." I love this line. It's evocative, and so familiar -- the way a person can come back to writing, over and over, no matter how long you've left it behind. I feel that, too. I also like hearing about your challenges. As I said to another writer here, I don't have children, and yet I share the frustration of not giving time to my writing. There's something about this that feels universal for women, a theme of carving out time for what gives our life meaning. Your advice at the end is so good: there will always be interruptions, "so I try to welcome them in". Thanks for this piece.
Rather than recreate the wheel here, I'll just attach the link to my first Substack piece, "Figuring It Out," where I begin the piece: "Writing has always been my way of trying to figure things out, to try and understand whatever puzzles me, people mostly—all the way back to when I was a geeky glasses-clad teenager and first trying to understand my family and my place within it." It's well over the 500 word limit so I don't wish to be considered for the mentor bit as lovely as that would be. I've met so many lovely folks, writers and others, from involvement with The Cure for Sleep, and by sharing the link to a longer piece of my writing I hope to meet a few more. I also did an audio recording of me reading the piece which is on my Substack as well.
Thank you so much for being one of our founding contributors here, and showing the way for so many who have joined since who also have their lives constrained in ways they wouldn't have chosen. To read this longer piece was very affecting for me, who has come to know and admire you through the short-form work you've shared here. To see the different strands of your story/your DNA coming together as they do in it. I've restacked it...
Ah thank you Monique. It was SO lovely to meet your beautiful friend Eva a few weeks ago at an event in London. You were spoken of by us both with much love and admiration xxx
My first memory of writing is aged about three, sitting at my granny’s kitchen table. I couldn’t actually write. I was doing what artists pleasingly and importantly call mark making. I knew what I was writing was serious because I was doing joined-up writing. That was how grown-ups wrote. I hid my writing in the airing cupboard, a warm, safe space for putting important things.
Later I wrote real, decipherable notes to my parents and hid them round the house in the hope that they would find them and understand me. I was often told off for talking too much as a child. I wrote down the important things in the hope that I wouldn’t be punished and that they would read what I was not allowed to say. I’m not sure they ever found them.
When that didn’t work, I went through a phase of writing my last will and testament. I wrote it over and over again. I was desperate by this time, so I gave up hiding them and would leave them out in plain view. I remember being so desperate I actually showed one to my mum. She said: ‘Why are you writing a will when you haven’t got anything to leave anyone?’ which very much missed the point. It’s not what I would have said if I had found one my kids incessantly writing their will at the age of 12.
I come from the generation of children brought up in the dying days of Victorian parenting methods. I felt like I was not seen and despite the talking, rarely heard. Writing was a different matter. Both my parents were readers, they valued the written word. I knew that if I could find the right way to make my mark, I stood a chance of being taken seriously. I had serious things to say.
What I took from my failed experience was that the way I wrote must be wrong. When my parents read what I had written, they didn’t engage with me in the way I hoped they would. I assumed that I hadn’t got the right words. It never occurred to me that they couldn’t or wouldn’t see what was in front of them, both in word and deed, and that it was not my fault.
Despite my failures I still believe that writing is my best chance of being seen and heard. The biggest challenge for me is publishing what I write. I am still fighting the desire to hide in the airing cupboard, desperate to be seen but afraid to be found out.
How do I write my truth while maintaining a relationship of trust and integrity with my family? I cannot write in isolation from my loved ones, but I cannot always find my way to writing myself without hurting them.
Thank you, Katy, for being first to brave a response to this question - which, three seasons in, felt right to offer you all: writing out of our deepest experiences being at the heart of the whole project as it is.
There is a force to your writing, a pulse, an urgency, that I've always responded to and admired - in your pieces for this project, and what I'm reading in your own Substack: which is beginning to have the feel for me of a fascinating serialised psychogeography book.
And now what you've written here gives me - and others reading it - an understanding of where that power comes from...
...I want to add 'in part' at this point: because your reading is wide and deep and hungry: that too gives authority to your prose - you are writing out of a long and yes, deep apprenticeship. An overlong apprenticeship perhaps, as mine was? You know from my book how long I held back from finding even a local outlet for my words, and why: like you, the need to be understood, to be seen and heard, was so fundamental that the risk of trying and failing - well it threatened obliteration. The loss of a held-out hope that kept me going.
Some lines from your piece that I want to pull out and focus on:
'Despite my failures I still believe that writing is my best chance of being seen and heard.'
I could have written this line myself, and everything in me says yes, yes, in response to reading it in your piece. We can be seen and valued in friendships, work roles, community groups, and in ways that nurture us. But writing - when we find a readership for it **beyond** our existing circles of belonging: this is where we can share more complicated, more nuanced, more urgent aspects of what matters to us.
How do I write my truth while maintaining a relationship of trust and integrity with my family?
I'm fairly sure you've read Melissa Febos' Body Work, where she reflects on this as someone whose first very explicit memoir came out when she was young; she has since revised how she writes the personal as it relates to others in her life.
For me personally, I found some odd and unexpected reactions to my writing based on what forum it was in: My mother was once very hurt by a single line of biography I gave in a Facebook post, back when I used it. In passing, I said to someone that I'd been raised by my farming grandmother. This was true for me emotionally and in many respects practically - all my sick days were spent with her; my weekends; my school holidays. I trusted her. Etc etc. Because my mother used Facebook this felt like a very public betrayal, even though the numbers of potential readers involved were a few hundred.
Once I no longer shared any social media forums with my family and friends, and struck out into separate territory as a writer I carried some of that learning with me. It's often very small offhand details that hurt our people when they read it rather than what we feel to be our biggest shames. This proved true with my book: Nye was very comfortable with me describing one of the greatest challenges in our marriage - actions of mine some Amazon reviewers revile me for! - but asked for single words or small details to be removed.
I also faced a larger challenge with TCFS. The book shows - at great risk to my public and private reputations - my love affair and bad behaviour as a result of that; it also shows the deep past forces that drove me to that, without excusing what I did. However, there were other difficult situations in my marriage not of my making that are NOT in the book - ones that came from my husband's side of the family, and which I was not free to write about. So. My decision was: Was there a true and useful story I could share in which some of what made me behave as I did was NOT in the story at all? I decided there was - even though I was aware that it meant me taking full narrative weight for bad behaviour that had more... what? More mitigating circumstances than I could share.
This is me trying to show some of my own decision-making process: yours will be different, but it DOES require this kind of thinking out. And then there are still the nights pre-publication when one wakes up in a cold sweat with the fear of what might happen!
I know there are other writers who take a much more straightforward approach to this issue of personal truth and the hurt it might cause. I think Annie Lamott is in this camp in Bird by Bird.
But much as I love the bracing permissions in her work and Mary Karr's, I feel the time we spend thinking about how to balance all this deepens our work.
Finally: what you say about the airing cupboard - in the past, and as an internalised space now. I too was an airing cupboard kid - literally. And publishing my memoir truly did feel like coming out. I've even come to be proud of the worst and most personally scathing reader reviews of my work online - people talk ill of us all the time: we usually don't have to hear it OR it's said as part of family/friends banter in a way that makes it hard for us to call it out. The praise of having one's work valued is truly beautiful (what you said about TCFS has carried me through many uncertain times, and always will). But the criticism and discounting and misunderstanding is also powerful: we stood up straight and showed ourselves - there's no shame in that, only courage.
Txx
NOTE: I won't curate responses to this month's invitation in full - and will only give a few lines as quotes, and only once each of you let me know by reply that you WOULD be happy for a short extract to be there. Would you prefer to have it here only? If you'd like to be quoted on the book site, perhaps you can choose a few sentences and let me know...
Thank you. Your words are so encouraging x
PS: I think you will already know the harrowing, beautiful The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, but have you watched her moving TED talk. It took her many years to move forward with that memoir, despite some very early and overwhelming interest in her as a writer...
https://www.ted.com/talks/lidia_yuknavitch_the_beauty_of_being_a_misfit
This is such a heartfelt piece and I'm really sorry that you had such a difficult experience when you wrote as a child. I can really understand and identify with much of what you say, especially around the need to write your truth without upsetting others. I don't think there's an easy answer to this, but I hope you can find a way to keep writing how you really feel. The challenge of publishing your writing is also definitely a hard one - but I'm so glad you shared this and hope you can keep putting your writing out there.
Thank you. It's very much a feeling your way through this process I think. x
This is powerful and written with such force of emotion. I could just feel that little girl's pain when writing her will. I hope you find a way to continue writing and sharing and that the serious little girl owns her story and has found joy, too. xx
Thank you. I will. x
I envy how your piece has a clear narrative arc despite it being only 500 words (I really struggled with this in writing my piece). It reads like a well-thought-out piece, and I could really feel this girl's longing to be seen, heard, appreciated and validated. And the motif of the airing cupboard is lovely -- literal and figurative, and the scene of a coming out. Thanks for this piece of really honest writing.
Thank you for such a thoughtful comment. x
Such an evocative piece, I can imagine being in your shoes as a child. The frustration, the yearning to be seen and heard, the fear about what it might mean to be ignored and punished. And now I find myself in the exact same space as you, how do I write my truth which so needs to be heard, whilst maintaining a relationship with my family? Where the wounds they inflicted are the seeds of my story but still unspoken. Thank you for voicing this.
You're welcome. I hope you find your way. xx
Can really feel your desire to be fully heard, seen and understood by your parents, Kate. And the pain of it not being heard, seen or understood...
Sharon - thank you as ever for being a writer in our project here, but also for the way you read and respond to others here. That's what makes this undertaking richer than I myself could ever have made it. xx
*Katy, oops, sorry !
Purge the panic and surge with joy
I write because I need to be consumed and subsumed by something bigger than my entity. I want to mend the severance of my grief and bridge a chasm of desolation with curiosity and exploration. I want to reach through the shrouds of loneliness and beyond the masks of coping to empathy for others. I write because I have no other God to call upon for safety, succour, or salvation.
Every morning I wake up to lumpy thoughts swirling into syllables which then mould themselves as words. When I write, I face my irascible monsters and turn them into pets. I listen to them, stroke them and encircle them with love as they doze by my side. I am grateful for my fears, grief, loss and loneliness because each facet plays it’s part to rebuild, renew, restore me. Writing helps me to pause my judgements and cultivate compassion, not just for other people, but also for my past, present and future self. Through writing, I have learned to tell my truth in a way that I’ve never had the courage to reveal verbally. I think of the process as a loving labour like revealing a rough gemstone’s glory by cutting, polishing, setting and wearing.
I’m challenged by ineptitude, self-doubts and a total absence of hope to write one single word of worth. Writing questions my validity, yet words ratify my existence. There are days when I am overwhelmed by doubt and paralysed by fear, preventing me from writing. I ask myself “Why is this hard and what am I scared of?” Then, I capture all codswallop tumbling from my mind and give my brain free reign and rein to splurge it’s jumbled pain. Just like the contents of a drawer tipped upon the floor, each thought is gathered, studied and recorded. Emotions are woven into words to create a cord to form a chord for a reader.
The next phase is taking my piece to my writing group for feedback. When joining such a group was first suggested I reacted with a severe panic attack. Within an hour of internet research I’d found a group online and had approached the organiser for joining details. It’s the only way I know to overcome my anxieties. Within twenty-four hours I was sitting in front of my computer listening to incredible people reading their work and listening to feedback. It took me a month before I set myself the goal of presenting a piece to the group. Now, I look forward to people telling me what they need more of and where they think I can improve. I relish the exposure a lazy or cliched sentence and immediately get excited about how I can re-write, improve and think deeper about what I really want to convey and how best to deliver. Despite my craving for connection, I’m filled with awe when others express that I have touched them.
Shazz Jamieson-Evans
Shazz! What a blast of energy and beautiful prose from you - your first time writing for the project too I think?
There is such momentum in your process as you describe it here: I admire that, as someone who has had to take a complete break from writing this last year.
This line in particular is beautiful to me: 'Emotions are woven into words to create a cord to form a chord for a reader.' Gorgeous, touching on several senses at once.
And my admiration to you for joining the writing group for feedback: I never had the courage to do this, and I see now how it slowed down my development as a writer, keeping things too private and not having any safe place to test my ideas and my prose out. (Why I've set up this project, so others will have a starting place for that).
This month's prompt is the only one where I won't be curating responses over on The Cure for Sleep website, as I'm wanting people to feel they can speak freely of deep concerns and tender places when it comes to writing and what it means to them.
But based on this piece by you, how much I hope you will start responding to themes in the archive - I will so enjoy publishing your work and giving you direct links to them so you can use them when sharing word of your writing life or applying for other courses...
Txx
Dear Tanya
Thank you so much for your wonderful message. Yes, it is my very first engagement with your project and I certainly am forming a plan to incorporate archived themes as a part of my writing routine. I am new to writing. I started in lockdown in response to my lovely and "bossy" Aunt who wanted me to write of my experiences living in Pakistan. Once I transcribed my journals, I then set out an action plan to learn the craft of writing. This has evolved and progressed to where I am right now, following you and enjoying applying myself to your themes. Thank you for setting up the project. It's really great to be a part of it.
This is wonderful. I especially loved the first three sentences of the second paragraph. Also, I never would have verbalized writing as a way to compassion for self and others, but that is it exactly. I always appreciate writing that makes me think differently, open up. Also, admire the courage of joining a writing group! xx
Dear Sheila thank you so much for your encouragement and supportive comments about my writing. You've really boosted my motivation to engage further and challenge myself. Reading your post has made a beautiful start to my day. Thank you x
I love this line: " I write because I have no other God to call upon for safety, succour, or salvation." And this one: "When I write, I face my irascible monsters and turn them into pets. I listen to them, stroke them and encircle them with love as they doze by my side." So much beautiful prose here. I envy your courage in joining a writing group -- it's on my list of things I must do! You've given me some great food for thought as I continue on my own writer's journey.
Tanya is this where you would post why do I write? Or is there another less public forum?
Hello Anne. I'd love it if you felt able to respond to this invitation. I do need responses to be given here via comments, but I don't have to curate them over on the cure for sleep site as I usually do with contributions to the other themes. So while this is an online forum, it's very tightly moderated by me - i get notifications of every new post, and can delete entirely and block anything/anyone who is not acting in the supportive spirit of the project.
I think it's also part of what I offer aspiring writers: can you find a way to write deep and sometimes tender truths and put them out into (modest/safe) public space? It's a safe way to test out how it feels to move from private expression or student/teacher sharings into speaking to a larger readership.
So I appreciate you may want to respond to this prompt perhaps just in your own journalling process. Another way I'd be able perhaps to hear you on this will be when I can next open up applications for free or paid mentoring: this is a question I ask all prospective mentees to respond to as part of the selection process. No dates coming up, but I'd always let my Substack community know first when I'm opening those up again.
All the other themes stay open for your words.
Txx
Thank you Tanya, so all writing submissions would be kept under your Cure for Sleep Substack site until final selection of essay?
Yes - for this prompt only I've decided not to curate responses over on the open cure for sleep site. While non-subscribers can read this Substack, they can't comment, and in reality I think very few non-active members of the community read all the nested replies. And now I think there's a submission from you waiting for me to read! xx
I write because what if as I began to piece together the first white gossamer shreds of memory, they are ripped away, leaving nothing of my beginnings by blackness, a slight limp and a distinctive laugh?
I have no memory of my original mothers voice, but there were times growing up when a familiar intonation, a wind blown conversation brought on a sharp intake of breath, and an almost unstoppable need to find its origin. I was caught between the desire to follow the voice and the dark shadow of abandonment. It set the rhythm of my days and it took a lifetime to change it.
For the first 40 years of my life, my bloodline was unknown to me, grafted onto a branch of English archbishops, genealogists, itinerant Norwegian weavers , professors, inventors, explorers, restless men, and unhappy women.
But the music of my beginnings would not let me be. It hummed through open windows, piped up through my bare feet and plucked my untamed hair. It came in the drone of the dulcimers strings in the songs of Ann Grimes, an early collector of Appalachia, music, and mother of my best friend, Sally. It came out in a cadence of a Carney man’s call, in the fire lit stories the tramps and travelers told stopping by the Olentangy River on their seasonal journey from southern mountains. It arrived in the bales of freshly shorn sheep‘s fleeces, in the whirl of the spinning wheel, and the sissing sound the threads made as they slipped through the hand set a reeds of a 100 year old loom. All these things were carefully piled at the edge of memory. They so changed the hue of the blackness that abandonment lost its power.
I stepped beyond the carefully laid out prison walls of my beginning to start the journey.
My earliest memories revolved around a black emptiness from whose edges blew a dry, cold ice like mist. When I was older and could use the dictionary, I was able to name this place which lies back of the beyond.
It was oblivion, the state of being forgotten.
My challenges are time, beginnings and endings….
Will I, at 82 be able to put all I found, in readable form.
.
Hi Susan I've just read your beautiful piece. Your words dance through my mind like lyrics. You've said so much about pain and emptiness, yet your words are filled with hope.
And to answer your question - Yes, I think and feel you are already doing just that.
Thank you for sharing
...and thank you to you, Shazz, for reading and responding this way to Susan's words. Each time members of the project do this for one another, it amplifies and deepens the power of what we're all doing here: having a sense of readers other than me makes it so much more valuable for contributors. xx
Shazz. My author self felt heard by your comments and encouraged! A shy smile escaped from this wrinkled old face. Gratitude
Susan
Susan... it means so much to me that you've joined this project as a contributor, and especially now in these tender days after the end of our rich Hagitude year. I already loved and admired your writing from what you have shared on that forum, but to receive this very complete and powerful piece of prose here, now? If your last line has a silent question:
'Will I, at 82, be able to put all I found, in readable form?
My answer, without hesitation, is: Yes. Yes. You already are. This is readable. This has form, and force. You have given us a sense of place, and a sense too of a mystery in your life that we, your readers, will care to learn more about. That will speak to similar, differently located puzzles in our own lives.
With regard to age: Do you know Florida Scott-Maxwell's The Measure of My Days? It's hard to get here in the UK but second-hand copies might be easier where you are. Also not easy to get but worthwhile: Hope L Bourne's Wild Harvest (she was a woman who lived alone & self-sufficient on Exmoor). The artist Anne Truitt's journal series also covers her 70s I believe. And May Sarton's published diaries cover her 80s as well as earlier decades. These to give you a sense of peers - but in other respects, I feel your voice and your themes have much in common with younger writers I admire immensely: Melissa Febos, Carmen Maria Machado... one of the joys of writing is that we can write away from as well as out of our age, I think...
I'm not curating responses to this month's theme over on the cure for sleep website as I usually do as I'm wanting to use my time to give more detailed feedback and suggestions than I normally do. But any contributions to themes in the archive that (I hope!) you make will be curated as normal.
Txxx
Wow! I made sure not to read what anyone else wrote until I posted something because I didn't want to be intimidated. I'm glad I made that choice because this is simply beautiful. The women in my life were not able to set an example of retaining a vitality while aging so I search out examples on my own....and this is just that, reassurance of the beauty in aging and the creativity that remains. This is poetic and heartfelt and and lovely. I want to read more! xx
Sheila...
I owe the elders in my life so much gratitude...both those who continued to do the “one foot in front of the other” dance and those who took to their beds. Perhaps the most memorable one was an artist, a mentor, and in her final years put down her brush and never painted again because her work no longer met her critical eye. And I saw the carving away of extraneous strokes, pure line. And I promised my self that would not happen... that I would die with pen, brush, needle in hand. And so...
Oh my goodness, this is amazing, I would love to read more, it is so rich and intoxicating and exciting...it feels like the first chapter of something wonderful and profound...please go on...
THE MIRROR: Why I Write
Before I was ten, I developed a survival strategy for all the images I could not hold up in the mirror. I was only in touch with the devouring aspect of the mother who gobbles up everything. I thought whatever she could not see, she could not devour.
I kept these thoughts, feelings, and sensations hidden in a journal. I wrote constantly, vigilantly. My journal was like a confidential secretary recording the story of my true self. It became a mirror where I could see and feel my truth resonating in my daily experience. The confusion, guilt, and anger I could not express verbally was processed through writing. Writing held my body and soul together. It was the only way for my true self to survive.
Being female meant being a servant like my mother when she was a girl. My mother was born in Northern Ireland. She was one of the youngest of nine children from a poor farmer's family. My mother worked in private homes as a domestic, washing and cleaning for families until she came to live with an aunt in America.
I could only get my mother's approval when I was "useful." She praised me when I was mother's little helper; she would fondly call me her" Right Hand Man." I was valued when I cleaned, ironed, or folded laundry. She made me believe that my only role in life was to be of service. To please her, I rejected aspects of myself, like creativity and femininity. The creative-maternal feminine does not exist in the devouring mother.
Because of the many household chores, I wrote stories, poems, and plays. I could feel pleasure by staying in my head; it was a way of dissociating. She would become furious if she caught me "scribbling," taking away from the efficiency of my chores. She would shred whatever I wrote. Any display of creativity threatened her. So, I learned to keep this pleasurable inner life hidden. Mother's approval came only from my chores and how quickly they were accomplished. The negative mother hates joy, and to do anything that one enjoys produces guilt.
She feared I would create, explore, or enjoy the world's sensual pleasures. If I did get caught in a moment of pleasure, she would scold me and make me feel guilty, call me selfish, useless, and good for nothing to keep me in my place.
One day, when I was ten, my mother sent me on an errand to buy potatoes. I went to the store on my bicycle with a friend. In that moment of guilty pleasure, I fell off the bike and broke my right arm. I remember sitting on the railroad tracks with my friend crying, not because I was in pain. Being right-handed was a gift and a curse. Not writing for a few months seemed unimaginable, so I scrawled with my left hand in defiant rebellion against the right-hand man as a servant to my writing.
Anne... this is a deeply moving piece of work, but also (this is the editor & writer in me responding) accomplished story-telling. I get the same feeling of place and circumstance and surprising growth-despite-constraints that I value in the work of Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping, Lila, Gilead) and also in Stoner by John Williams. Do you know this book? I most often recommend it to men I mentor, because it awards deep attention and care to the inner live of an obscure, quiet, good man - rare in this respect I feel. But now I feel that it would speak to you and keep you good company in your creative life if you don't already know it.
Stoner is born into an impoverished farming family during depression: the only child. When a farm agent suggests he should go to agricultural college to study soil health, the parents grace his going though they hardly use words. But then Stoner gets a calling to devote his life to literature. The scene where he breaks it to his parents after graduation that he won't be returning to the farm but working instead in academia... it is understated and absolutely devastating... the blow to them because of the brutality of the work made worse by losing his strength, but more so what it costs him to own that need in himself...:
[I've just run downstairs to fetch it for you]
'Stoner tried to explain to his father what he intended to do, tried to evoke in him his own sense of significance and purpose. He listened to his words fall as if from the mouth of another, and watched his father's face, which received those words as a stone receives the repeated blows of a fist. When he had finished he sat with his head bowed. He listened to the silence of the room.
Finally his father moved in his chair. Stoner looked up. His parents' faces confronted him; he almost cried out to them. '
The remaining few paragraphs of that scene are heartrending and understated and contain a whole time and place as well as the story of those three people. I'll leave you to discover the rest yourself, if it speaks to you. And if you already know and love it, then I want you to know I felt your prose here has a similar strength.
On your need to keep your rich inner life hidden: I'm curious to know how or if that affects you now in terms of sharing your work with others? Does it make it harder to share your words? Or is there a pleasure in feeling your creative self survived and can now come out to play? Or something else entirely? I'd be interested to hear more...
Thank you Tanya, no I have not even heard of the book Stoner, but I will certainly order it. I'm very interested. I did not know about Marilynn Robinson either. Will look into both writers.
I'm getting better at sharing my work. I used to be very guarded, but I've given myself more permission in past few years. Sometimes when it feels too personal, I hesitate. Yes, there is certainly a pleasure in feeling my creative self survived and is still thriving! Yes, just the other day I realized it is about being able to come out and play, it doesn't need any other purpose than that! Thank you for your encouragement.💖
Come out and play! Love this... and yes, yes to that. As a child who had to become more serious at a young age that was my natural temperament, I share this wish to find ways to play now at midlife! xx
I really like how you've cleverly woven together the references to the 'right hand' here. First the idea of being the reluctant 'right-hand man' servant to your mother, and then, while having fun and just being a kid, you break your right arm, and rebel by learning to write with your left. It felt like the girl was shaking her left fist at having to be a servant, and saying 'no! I'm not who you think I am!' Very nicely done and a good way to make this piece feel like it has a clear thread running through it.
Wow, Wendy Thank you for your wonderful feedback. You totally validated what I was trying to express!
I put pen in my hand and suddenly I'm a river where before I was a couch. The words come forth and flow. Confessions, songs, journeys, poems. Elemental talk, dreams, character arc, Gaia's whispers. Divination, inner stories, outward observations, news of the world. Confessions and Prayers. For this I must write. Mystical visions and spirit callings. For this I must write. Poetic visions and gateways with words. For this I must write. Stream of consciousness and voices of the wild. For this I must write. To live and to let die. For this I must write. To create and to conjure. For this I must write.
I put pen in my hand and suddenly I'm a waterfall where before I was a dam. The words come forth and insist to be known, to be recognized. The page is a record playing the song I hear in me and in you. The typeset is a sculpture, a work of written art that took form and gave me flight. This is why I write.
I am in the midst of writing my first book titled Living Within the Beauty of the Earth. It is a work of nonfiction composed along with Nature. I discovered my poetic self in 7th grade English and I have written ever since. Writing is the river that confesses and reworks my emotional life. Writing is a way to express my soul path and mission to be a co creator with Gaia Earth. I was a paraeducator for 22 years and made the conscious choice at age 51 to resign. While navigating the uncertainty of my life after leaving the safety of a mainstream job and its revenue stream, a strong voice inside kept showing up to say your work in the world now should be tied to writing. I can be in service to Nature in this medium of writing. It is a soul calling and I am listening and following through with courage and joy. I am a writer and I feel like that has always been with me at the core. It is who I am and it is a liberating thing to declare it as my main work and purpose in the world.
Suzanne! Welcome to our community here - and what a joyous first contribution.
This month's prompt is different in that I'm not curating pieces over on the cure for sleep website, from wanting to give people a chance to speak to a more closed group of their struggles in writing or sharing work once they have. But if you write for any of the other themes in the project it will be my pleasure to curate them into the story archive.
Your prose has the force and energy and movement of the natural sources that your celebrate. I will love seeing more work from you here, and how your style and sensibility responds to them.
xxx
Thank you, Tanya! Your work here is a gift to writers everywhere. It is truly an amazing offering you give to let writers share on your platform. I discovered you through Sharon Blackie's recommendation on her substack. I'm looking forward to reading your book!
Ah! Big smile reading this. Grateful. Thank you! xx
I really like the image you create of putting the pen in your hand and boom! a river, or boom! a waterfall. That's so powerful. I also really relate to turning 50+, leaving your career and knowing writing must be part of the rest of your life. That's true for me, too. Your book sounds fascinating and I look forward to reading more of your contributions.
Thank you for your kind words, Wendy! It feels so supportive to know you are having a similar experience with a career change leading to a mighty call for writing to be in the driver's seat of your life! I look forward to reading your work here as well!
I can’t remember when the wall went up.
It wasn’t there when I first said ‘mama’ or crawled, stood, then stepped; it’s not in the pictures.
But its black brick foundation was already laid when I was the girl in the yellow sandbox, collecting ladybugs by day and scribbling in my journal by night.
Sections of it guarded me at school, keeping secrets safe, and while I sat on the top cellar step, light streaming in under the locked door.
At eighteen, newly homeless, all glimmers of privilege faded; I finished the wall with black crack-resistant caulk and never looked back.
But then came the curtain. A thin, white veil, a haze separating me from everyone – except, I would learn later, from my children, my current husband, and my Labrador. Invisible, this gauzy layer could turn thick, suffocating me, my words.
An achiever, I functioned highly. After all, one must have friends, holidays, careers, and love; The Myth of Normal, says Gabor. So, I created a good life on the other side of the wall, where, tangled in the white curtain, I lived to work.
While my head led the way, my body stored the pain. My heart, she was busy caring for others. And my spirit, she’d run away.
You see, I thought I’d freed myself.
It’s only just now, thirty-three years later, as I write this response to your prompt like when I was a student, do I fully understand:
I sealed my Self inside the wall and installed a curtain to detach.
__
The wall fell on January 6, 2020. My body said, ‘No more.’ My head shouted, ‘Save the body! We must live to work!’ And, my heart, well, it was in bits, like the red rose petals we scattered across my mother’s coffin two months before.
She died in a car crash, smashing the wall and me.
I don’t remember when I came to. I guess that depends upon what it means to be awake. Is the white curtain still supposed to be there?
If so, then it was just this summer when, in a final push, I asked a healer for help.
Three handwritten letters later, so thick they struggled to burn, I sat with a shiatsu practitioner. As if requesting a simple repair, I explained: ‘My mind, spirit, and heart are finally connected, but my body isn’t following…Can you help?’
A miracle: the quartet reunited and the curtain dropped. There in my body, where I’d never looked, was me, beginning with the girl in the yellow sandbox.
This is why I write; why I can and must write now.
Others have walls and curtains; maybe if I share, they can dismantle theirs and find themselves before they crash.
It’s just working out how to explain it all.
Permission to expose the madness: my final frontier.
Capture it on the page, give it a cover, and release it once and for all.
At least, I think that’s what might happen; you tell me.
Such a powerful description of how you - how so many of us in different ways - create those compartments/containers/rooms to stay safe through childhood til we can get free. It is a physical building of structures - I felt that too (and there's a line in my book where I describe, at 9, dividing into two: my inner self wanted only to sleep and be rescued; the other one...
'...was a sturdy girl...who went to school like a man to a mine, or farmer to his field. Education as a manual labour, through which – lesson by lesson, year by year – I’d tunnel beyond home and town.'
The cortisol and adrenalin my system was flooded with led to years of infections, sleeplessness, depersonalisation...
So I have some understanding of what work, what risk, what courage it is taking for you to be bringing your body, your memory, your voice together and then beginning to share your writing.
I can't know if it is coincidence, but I do know that my chronic joint pain and constant infections ceased six months or so after publication of the book, once all the immediate worry and demands of publishing receded. And have stayed away since. To write the book made all those symptoms much much worse - 17 weeks in bed in 2021: often swollen as if I'd been in an accident. But now: I feel so free, so at ease and better able to handle life challenges as they come (as they always do).
I love the challenge of your last line: 'At least I think that's what might happen; you tell me'.
I can't of course: I can only say, as I have, what happened for me. But I hope very much that this project will be one of the places where you can explore that what next...
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Tanya. It feels so welcoming, this space, and to know that you, and others here, have a sense of what it takes to bring all of yourself together and share your stories with others. I'm sorry to hear that you also suffered chronic pain issues; I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia a long time ago, but never realized the cause until several years ago. At the moment writing is providing a sense of freedom from the past and of/for the present and future, but, as I write my memoir, which I'm now beginning, I imagine that there will be ebbs and flows - more to be learned along the way, of that I am sure. Thank you again.
Hi Tanya, I am now further along in your book; to where your pain becomes a theme. As I read, I can’t help but feel a connection; although we’ve led completely different lives, there’s something so familiar. I am grateful for the effort and care with which you share your story. Now I’ll continue reading...
It's moving to be given this realtime sense of how you are responding to the book. Thank you. xx
Why do I write?
I write to understand myself. A cliche.
I write to understand my life. Also a cliche.
I write for my children. To show them that they can know themselves and their own hearts.
I write to understand the world and my tiny place in it. To find something. Anything. To fill the vastness.
I write to find peace and silence. To soothe.
I write to explore my feelings and emotions, to listen to my heart beat.
I write to quiet the noise, the storms that often stop me in my tracks
I write to shut my noisy thoughts, to calm the chaotic chatter. Get it all out.
I write to define love and find meaning in my existence.
I write to clear the clutter, to carve a path through the messiness that often fills my mind.
I write to write myself out, to heal my heart and pain.
I write to remember, loves lost, people gone forever, to celebrate life and joy.
I write to honour my life and those that have walked it with me.
I write to to be curious, long lists of dreams and plans, hopes and fears. To consider what comes next.
I write to feel the pen in my hand and see the ink on the page, a physical act.
I write for comfort. To speak my absolute truth. A safe space. A haven.
I write to speak the unsaid. The things that I can only say to myself. The hidden parts of my soul.
I write to problem solve, to ask questions of my life and look for answers, patterns.
I write to create, to explore words and sentences. To fulfil a part of me that yearns to make something.
I write to find hope, to revisit the darkest times and find light in their passing.
I write to find energy. The energy to move through this life.
I write because it pushes me to the limits of myself, it challenges me to press against the outer boundary of safety and comfort. Like dipping myself in the grey icy winter sea, I seek in mid life to push back the edges of me. Of what I am capable of.
I write to re-define who I am. To change. To become better. To become myself.
I don’t write because I need to be anywhere or travel with it. This act is enough.
Helen... fascinating: I first read submissions as they come through to me as emails: they don't have the same formatting there that they do over here on Substack, so I later click through and look at them again as part of responding with my reader feedback.
This piece by you had such an incredible force driving through it, an incantatory quality, so that I began to read it out loud to better feel and enjoy that aspect of it. I had a huge smile then to see it here, with the formatting you intended, because instead of one large paragraph that I first read, I see that you intended it to have that poetic form and declarative aspect.
What I love is that even with the formatting not there initially, I could still tell - from the quality of your prose - what you intended. That's a rare thing.
I felt the kind of energy that runs through Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison. And I'm curious to know which writers you feel most in the company of? It might be very different ones to these of course...
xx
Ah thanks Tanya as always for your lovely and generous feedback. I don’t really know who my favourite writers are these days to be honest- I am drawn a lot to short form writers though. That might be due to time more than anything though at the moment. I didn’t write anything but my journals for years until I discovered your project and it’s been such a positive experience so again, thankyou for your generosity creating it xxx
I love this! The way you have set it out as a chant is brilliant but also how much you are able to say in a limited space. Your line “I write to speak the unsaid” really resonates with me, as well as “writing pushes me to the limits of myself”, with its vivid analogy of dipping yourself in the icy sea.
A wonderful manifesto to all the reasons to write. My favorite l was "I write to write myself out," because I felt there are so many ways to interpret this line, sometimes writing myself out as a discovery and other times just writing myself out as a wringing myself out of all of the self perpetuating, weary thoughts. I'll be carrying this line with me today. Also thought the last line was perfect. It is enough just to write...
Writing has always been tied to my sense of self. A published writer is all I ever wanted to be.
But for years, my creative writing self was stuck. When words did come, unbidden and fleeting like late summer butterflies, I struggled to catch them, fix them into something permanent. I didn’t mind, I had time, the words would reappear when the time was right.
Yet oncoming age has changed everything; there is now an increasing rhythmic insistence. If Virginia Woolf’s head was “a hive of words that won’t settle”, then mine has the ceaseless thrum of a woodpecker’s drilling beak, rattling my brain and nervous system.
I need to steadily set things down to empty my mind and still the noise.
I need to tell my story and carefully pass it on to my daughter, so she can one day read and understand why the newspaper headlines didn't tell the full story of that chapter in my life.
By writing, I can shape my narrative with my own hands. To say how it really felt. To become the heroine of my own story, as Nora Ephron once suggested.
In a world spinning out on its axis, writing can offer control. It can also sometimes exorcise demons, allowing me to meet my monsters out in the open, to do battle on the blank page.
As a naturally quiet person I’ve learnt to speak up, but I rarely voice the words I want to say. For fear of being misunderstood or thought too intense, too boring, just too much. By writing my feelings down I can make better sense of them and occasionally channel them into something fluent, more eloquent than I can say out loud.
I try not to be constrained by the people whose censure used to worry me and hinder my writing. But now I’m the one putting up the barriers, getting in my own way when my writing is unable to capture the images in my head.
As my creative self asks me what am I trying to say, yet refuses to help me find the right words and mocks my endeavours to put my writing into the world. Taunting me with embarrassment that I’ve laid my soul so bare and given so much away which I can never get back.
So that now, whilst writing the book I’ve recently started, my doubts sneer and threaten so that I wonder if I will ever finish it. Writing creatively is hard when my sense of self is such a contradictory creature...
Yet, despite this, I'm compelled to keep going. As if I don’t do it, I won’t quite know who I really am.
Davina, so very moved by what you've written here - that interplay of necessity, determination with embarrassment, vulnerability...
Do you have quotes from other writers copied out by hand or printed out and stuck up in view/stuck into your writing book? I always need to have them nearby to remind me that even the Nobel Laureates, even the famous authors of our time, go through this. And not just for their first books.
If you haven't already read it, do do do get Steinbeck's Diary of a Novel (I think that's the title: it's a journal he kept alongside the writing of East of Eden - the book of his place and people he'd been wanting to write for his sons - as you want to write for your daughter - all his life). For days before the book starts, you see him in the diary fiddling about, sharpening pencils, sitting with the fear of beginning. It is such a rich process book.
I also find this quote from Jeanette Winterson in her Paris Review interview coming to mind as I read you:
WINTERSON
Whenever we talk about writing, we start to talk about paradoxes. We’ve talked about respect and challenge. Now we are talking about chutzpah and humility. The writer is at once the most abject of people and the most arrogant. Because the person who really knows, knows the glories of the past and how significant they are to him or her, is at the same time prepared to say, And now I will add to them.
I love this from her as it speaks to both sides of what it takes to persist with our stories of our times and places (as she began her long career by writing of her people in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit).
Also take a look at this great short film from the Paris Review My First Time series. Sheila Heti describing the strange and feverish processes she improvised to make her first book...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fJ6AFcdh6A
I'm not curating pieces into the cure for sleep website with this month's theme as I'm spending more time giving detailed responses here than usual. But any pieces you write for themes in the archive will be curated as usual
Tanya xx
Thank you so much for your careful, detailed and generous feedback, Tanya. I definitely should make a habit of writing down/sticking up quotes from other authors about writing! Despite reading a few books about the writing process (Graham Swift’s “Writing an elephant” was a particular favourite), it will be cathartic to read more.
And you’ve aptly selected two of my favourite writers to read more of: Steinbeck and Jeanette Winterson. Shamefully I hadn’t heard of either Steinbeck’s diary book (how did I miss that?) or Winterson’s interview - but I’m looking forward to finding both & reading them.
I found Sheila Heti’s thoughts in the short film quite insightful. Especially the line - “In what ways do you need to trick yourself into writing this book.” That was very revealing and also helpful for me to hear that.
Thank you once again & best wishes for your upcoming birthday!
I write because I don’t know how to speak.
My voice is girlish, with a lisp that leaks into tired or nervous lines and I never know which accent to use; the clipped cockney of my Portsmouth childhood; the arch drawl I caught at the expensive school I was sent to; the ironic snarl I affected whilst trying to be cool in London, or the rolling burr of rural Dorset where I have lived for the last thirty years? This indecisive voice depends on the company it is keeping. It tries too hard to fit in.
My mother said I didn’t talk until I was well past three. She took me to an educational psychologist who told her not to worry.
On paper or on the laptop screen the “voice” is mine alone. One I couldn’t quite describe until Tanya did! “Disquieting”. That’s it! Upsetting the quiet. Using humour to unsettle. To share. To communicate something in an entertaining and memorable way.
The scrape of a sharp pencil or the yielding tap of my rose gold keyboard are sounds that give birth to a voice I am learning to prefer. One that thinks before it speaks, that makes the wrong comment disappear so nothing can embarrass or trample around my head at dawn. My written voice is not, of course, perfect; it doesn’t always know the right word or express emotions exactly, but it’s a better voice; more authentic, less affected.
I am tired of hearing my spoken voice. Tucked into my mental attic is an enormous archive of amusing anecdotes and small talk for any occasion. A writer doesn’t have to fill space. A writer listens. A writer is calm. Staying silent is a challenge. “You’re weird today” “Are you yourself?” friends ask and I perform to show I am.
Capturing and recording other people’s words is not a challenge. I have notebooks stuffed with absorbing quotes and observations. Finding a suitable home for them is hard, however, but not impossible. The skill lies in stopping them spilling out before they are ready .
Sometimes I feel swamped with material. Everything seems fascinating, extraordinary or meaningful. I accept every invitation because I know there will be material lurking in the corner. Something to store in a notebook or swill around my memory. Since stopping full-time work I have participated in all kinds of odd pastimes, meetings, workshops or part-time roles. Not for the money, or the companionship, or even the exercise. Simply for the glorious oddness that exists in the apparently sleepy market where I live. Death cafes, pickleball, estate agents, everything is full of stories that compete for attention. Today is my sixty-fourth birthday and I am acutely aware of the passing of time. I want to edit my novel “Act Your Age”, finish a collection of short stories “Endgames”, create an online profile, and keep myself fit and alive. Writing, not speaking, is living for me. Becoming a silent three-year-old again.
Rosalyn, once again you move me with your distinct prose - this gift you have for weaving together vivid and yes unsettling glimpses of the past with authorial perspective on how that past has formed you. That second paragraph... how much you do in it.
Do, please, take a look at this extraordinary short film featuring Christine Schutt for the Paris Review's My First Time series. How clear she is about her 60s coming up, and why she needed to commit to her writing for good as she didn't in her 20s. But why I'm recommending it in particular is for the body language as much as what she says. It compelled me so much that I transcribed the interview adding all of her gestures in as well. The way she touches her throat, shakes her head. A lot of what she is talking about is how she was spoken to and how close she came to stopping. It's a strange sort of birthday gift to be offering you but one I think you will respond to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh7hx-eIyq0
I'm not curating pieces for this theme only as I want the chance to give more detailed feedback than usual. But anything you write for the other ones in the archive will be moved across and linked to as before.
So glad you are part of this project. Txxx
I write to celebrate the startle of orange chicken of the woods mushrooms, the walk home through the tree shaded paths with my T-shirt made into a basket, the sauteing with garlic, the cream, salt and pepper, fresh rosemary and shredded Parmesan on steaming pasta. To remember the feeling of picking my son up at the airport after a year away, late afternoon kayaking and the loud smack of a beaver tail. To remember the thin film of flour on the counter, my aproned daughter sparkling with sugar, always happiest when baking.
I write because life cycles by and cycles through and it's so easy to forget the golden parts and writing is the only way through the dark parts.
Because writing can hold what cannot be said. Writing doesn’t tell me I’m crazy, doesn’t say, “I will,” and then doesn’t. Writing doesn’t walk away.
Because I live timidly in small circles that long to ripple out across a pond filled with the haunting wail of loons.
Because I want more.
I write because thoughts move in and circle like vultures. I write because words trail along with me on walks, drop heavy like October hickory nuts and are sometimes hidden in the tapestry of fallen leaves, words brown and yellow, and sometimes bold scattered reds. I write because words are irrepressible and hang about like a cross squirrel with flagging tail if not released onto the page. And because by this time of my life I’ve repeated my stories too many times, and they’ve become just that: a story I tell, lacking emotional truth, told to make sure others don’t feel uncomfortable.
I write because I love the edits, the changes, watching words become more when gathered and rearranged. I write because metaphor allows the truth to be told without shaming people who loved me the best that they could. Writing pushes me out of my comfort zone even though the words sometimes collapse in on themselves. Nothing is ever wasted.
I write because women before me were silenced and because other women dare to share and their courage inspires.
I write because it is mine.
And yet, I am challenged by being born responsible for others, a heart laid claim to before its first beat, the enduring pull to protect, do the right thing, prove worth. I am challenged by to-do lists, work, chickens to feed, laundry, dirty floors and an insistent dog. I buy the groceries and cook the food. I clean the toilet and write the bills. Even when the list is done, there's the challenge of believing, the persistent doubt that tells me it’s all been written, I could spend this time learning something useful. Sometimes I fear the truth that will be uncovered. I hold back, not wanting to hurt anyone more than I have, knowing I can’t tell everyone’s truth and the truth changes.
Sheila, tears reading this - the sort that have nothing to do with happy or sad or worried, but are to do with being party to someone showing their gift for a thing. You are a true writer. I've known it since your first piece came through, but this makes me feel urgent about your work. Please, please - whatever your other writing project plans - please, Sheila, will you write a book about food? About cooking? There's a way it's not written about enough, and you can do it. I have a hungry feeling just saying it. If you write it, I would be first in line as a first reader and supporter (should you need me for that).
'the startle of orange chicken of the woods mushrooms'... 'Because I live timidly in small circles that long to ripple out across a pond filled with the haunting wail of loons.' ... 'metaphor allows the truth to be told without shaming people who loved me the best that they could' - this is such exciting writing.
While I don't often read novels, and not the bestseller sort, I gave a whole day in the gardens at the bottom of town last year very happily to Where The Crawdads Sing. Some clunky plot devices aside, it worked a spell of time and place on me. I was there: a landscape and culture I've never known. You can do this too: perhaps writing about food, prepared in response to the comings and goings of tasks, a dog, loved ones, is another way you can work with short scenes or stories as you said you want to, while still creating a long form work?
xxx
Tanya, Once again, blown away by your comments. It's difficult to explain how it feels to have grown up feeling like I had no creativity at all, to finding out that I like to write, and then to having someone with your skill offer me up so much encouragement. My heart swells with gratitude to you. I had been thinking of ways to structure a project since my writing (even the stuff that I do that isn't part of your project) just seems like random responses to daily life and past memories that float up. I was thinking of using the Pre-nest, Nest, and Post-nest pieces I shared here as section markers to sort of make sense of what I was writing. I think food writing would definitely fit into that, but I'm also intrigued with just writing about food too. So much to write about there.....Jeff (my husband) was diagnosed with cancer when he was 31, Emily was nearly 2, and Jesse was due in about three months. Jeff is still alive and well, but was when I got serious about food and health, cooking as love. I'm so excited by the opportunities that you offered up here as different approaches to writing. I would love to have you be a first reader and laughed when you offered supporter should I need one. I feel quite certain of needing support. I really look forward to you potentially offering a class in the new year. Until then, I'll keep writing and see what I end up with. Looking forward to having you in the kitchen sometime in 2024! Thank you so much! xxx
...glad I said what I was thinking/intuiting about the importance of food, your kitchen. Moved to learn now when that began to be so, and why. And when (not if) I arrived at your backdoor... what a special feeling that will be, to be in this place that lives so brightly in my imagination now. xxx
Writing has been a gift and a lesson in the act and art of noticing.
Every time I write, it’s an opportunity to observe the transience and yet enduring persistence of the everyday. It’s all at once the comforting clasp of a tiny hand and the dull ache of longing and grief. Through writing, I can hold the weight of joy and despair in both hands and feel their outline. Above all it’s a reminder to grasp hold of the novelty and awe that we so often lose as adults.
My writing journey began with learning how to read. As a child, I was often found hiding in a corner, head down immersed in a book. Reading was all at once an escape, a place of solace and a welcome distraction. It became a magical way to dive deep into fantastical otherworldly places and to make sense of the world around me. As my messy handwriting evolved alongside my reading, secret scribbles and scraps of poems appeared on the page in determined scratchy, spidery marks.
Eight-year-old me dreamt of writing and I would copy out my favourite books. Yet in my teens writing became something secretive and furtive, adolescent self-consciousness and a desire to break away from family ties, led me to throw many notebooks away in rebellion. Years passed and I swallowed down my desire to write, pushing it aside in pursuit of independence and a career. But the words were always there, jangling in my pockets like loose change.
It was not until the arrival of my first-born that I returned to writing. Becoming a parent opened the floodgates to the words that had long remained dormant. My notes app became filled with 3AM thoughts, threads of poems and lines of prose that would not settle until I had captured them. Yet writing whilst mothering presented a whole new world of challenges; from the perpetual interruption to the bone-aching sleep deprivation, from the loss of identity to the pervasive and intrusive feelings of guilt and imposter syndrome to name a few. During the first few years, I found it hard to let go and lean into the interruption, frustration would seep into my writing and I grieved the lack of space and time to create. Yet for any writer, time presents itself as a slippery creature and over the years, I’ve come to value time’s elasticity and luminosity. From the snatched early moments when I rise before the rest of the house and write for fifteen minutes to the pockets of time that appear as I fall asleep, no matter how long I leave it, I can always return to the page.
As I enter a new season of my mothering journey, I’ve come to view my writing with compassion and to value its unerring companionship. The perpetual interruptions of life will always be there, so I try to welcome them in and invite them to kindle my curiosity and fuel my desire to write.
This resonates with me so much! Thank you for the wisdom of your final lines and their kindness.
Oh wow, thank you so very much Amelia, that’s so kind. Just off to read your words xxx
Thank you for joining us here, Lucy, and with this beautiful first contribution (and if you respond to any of the others in the archive, I will be glad to curate them over on the cure for sleep website: it's only with this one that I'm not doing that, as I wanted to spend more time giving more detailed feedback than usual, for those who've identified blocks or struggles).
I love the lifelong sense of you as a reader and writer you share with us here, and was moved in particular by the beauty and wisdom of this line towards the end: 'As I enter a new season of my mothering journey, I’ve come to view my writing with compassion and to value its unerring companionship.' Our writing as a steadfast presence even as our other relationships ebb and flow. How wonderful.
Thank you so much Tanya for the welcome and your lovely words and for taking the time to read my words... It always feels so terrifying sharing and I often find myself running to the hills and hiding away with a big vulnerability hangover whenever I’ve shared something. This space and community is truly magical and I can’t wait to join in properly and respond to the rest of the prompts. Thanks again and sending you best wishes from a very wild and windy Cornwall x
I will so enjoy receiving more from you whenever you have time and interest. I'm glad I decided early on to keep all themes open - it means those of you arriving here in Year 3 can soon feel to have been as fully part of the project as folk who wrote for the first prompts back in 2021. I also think writing deadlines - necessary though they are for Prizes - stop a lot of talent finding an audience because the deadlines rarely fit with our full-time work, or caring responsibilities...
Wild and windy Cornwall... oh, heart tug. Though I love Sussex and am fully settled here now 30 years, til August I always had Mum back there. So the long drive there and back had to be done and done often. Now... I think it will be a while til I'm there again. But I do miss 'the real sea' as I think of it... xx
"... the words were always there, jangling in my pockets like loose change." I love this line. It's evocative, and so familiar -- the way a person can come back to writing, over and over, no matter how long you've left it behind. I feel that, too. I also like hearing about your challenges. As I said to another writer here, I don't have children, and yet I share the frustration of not giving time to my writing. There's something about this that feels universal for women, a theme of carving out time for what gives our life meaning. Your advice at the end is so good: there will always be interruptions, "so I try to welcome them in". Thanks for this piece.
Rather than recreate the wheel here, I'll just attach the link to my first Substack piece, "Figuring It Out," where I begin the piece: "Writing has always been my way of trying to figure things out, to try and understand whatever puzzles me, people mostly—all the way back to when I was a geeky glasses-clad teenager and first trying to understand my family and my place within it." It's well over the 500 word limit so I don't wish to be considered for the mentor bit as lovely as that would be. I've met so many lovely folks, writers and others, from involvement with The Cure for Sleep, and by sharing the link to a longer piece of my writing I hope to meet a few more. I also did an audio recording of me reading the piece which is on my Substack as well.
Written
https://amymillios.substack.com/p/figuring-it-out
Audio
https://amymillios.substack.com/p/figuring-it-out-b7d#details
Thank you so much for being one of our founding contributors here, and showing the way for so many who have joined since who also have their lives constrained in ways they wouldn't have chosen. To read this longer piece was very affecting for me, who has come to know and admire you through the short-form work you've shared here. To see the different strands of your story/your DNA coming together as they do in it. I've restacked it...
xx